ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the literature and provides a summary of the technical features that distinguish experts from non-experts performing multi-articular sport actions, specifically throwing, kicking, and hitting actions. A key feature of all throwing, kicking, and hitting techniques is the sequencing and timing of body segment motions. The amount of variability in the movement patterns of throwing, kicking, and hitting actions is usually considered, often intuitively, to be a good indicator of level of expertise. The problem with focusing essentially on outcome measures was nicely demonstrated in the often-cited study of Arutyunyan, Gurfinkel, and Mirskii, which compared expert and novice marksmen in a simulated pistol shooting task—another type of multi-articular sport action. In baseball batting, Inkster, Murphy, Bower, and Watsford reported that highly skilled hitters exhibited significantly greater angular velocities of the pelvis and lead elbow compared to less-skilled hitters, which apparently contributed to the significantly higher linear bat speeds generated by the former.
